DAYS OF RAGE: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough. This well-told, if sensationalized, chronicle of the Weather Underground and other radical left groups of the 1970s captures a time when middle-class kids spouted revolutionary rhetoric and set off bombs in government buildings, while the FBI sometimes skirted the law in pursuing them. (Penguin Press, $29.95)

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, Volume 1: Search for My Heart, by Larry Kramer. The groundbreaking AIDS activist and playwright ("The Normal Heart") has worked for decades on this sprawling, nearly 800-page novel -- and it's only Volume 1. A wildly imaginative retelling of American history with homosexuality center stage -- here that includes Washington, Hamilton, Lincoln and Twain -- it is also a prehistory of the plague that will become AIDS. Volume 2 is on the way. (FSG, $40)

OUT CAME THE SUN: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family, by Mariel Hemingway. This memoir by actress and advocate Hemingway has already garnered headlines for the revelation that Woody Allen tried to seduce her when she was 18. But the book is primarily an account of her famous family (her grandfather was author Ernest Hemingway) and their struggles with mental illness and suicide. She's also written a version of the story for teens, "Invisible Girl." (Regan Arts, $26.95)